Nov. 20, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
04:45
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| And my friend was just so cynical. | |
| You know? | |
| I just can't... | |
| You know, with religion, I just can't buy it. | |
| I just can't buy it. | |
| Cynical, cynical, cynical. | |
| Black hole of cynicism. | |
| I remember he used to have a joke, uh... | |
| That was like a late-night bowl. | |
| Sorts like objects, right? | |
| Sorts like objects. | |
| You put all your broccoli in here, you put all your radishes in here, you shake them, and it sorts like objects, you know? | |
| And the way he did it was, I'm not really recreating it too well, and he was very funny. | |
| But, oh my God, just disassembling all human elevation, right? | |
| Nobility and comedy are deeply, deeply, deeply at war. | |
| Virtue and comedy are deeply, deeply, deeply at war. | |
| Because comedy is about disassembling nobility. | |
| Right? | |
| I mean, when I grew up, There was the knights of the round table. | |
| Now those, you know, Guinevere and Lancelot and, well, not that Guinevere was the knight, but, you know, King Arthur, Lancelot, Galahad, they were noble to me. | |
| And I had a book on knighthood that I remember when it was like, what's the one thing you would say from a fire, bring it into school on the last day? | |
| And I brought in that book because I absolutely loved the idea of nobility. | |
| Penance. | |
| Swords. | |
| Sunshine. | |
| Mourning. | |
| Mist. | |
| The Aragorn running at the gates of Mordor. | |
| I loved that shit when I was a kid. | |
| I still love it. | |
| I'm absolutely unabashed. | |
| I love that stuff. | |
| Horns in the morning. | |
| A fierce enemy. | |
| Wind in your hair. | |
| A sweaty horse between your legs. | |
| Riding down. | |
| The bad guys! | |
| Maybe even sticking their heads on a pike. | |
| Back in the day. | |
| medieval days, right? | |
| Born to conquer the world, destined to write LMFAO on the internet at any shred of nobility. | |
| LMFAO Thank you. | |
| There's an old line from a not-very-good movie where Tom Hanks plays a comedian, and he says, well, I'm a comedian because I think nothing is funny. | |
| Which is, you know, one of these deepities, but it actually did stick like a bit of a burr in my brain because if you go from the history of England and the nobility of King Arthur and the knights, right? | |
| The antithesis of that is Monty Python, where the knights are all goofy and foolish, and the king is goofy and foolish, and the king who pulls the sword Excalibur from them becomes the king, and then it's just like, you know, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is not a basis for, right? | |
| So there's the nobility And then there's the comedy, and the comedy is at war with the nobility. | |
| Now, nobility does have a certain amount of pompousness and grandiosity, which does need puncturing from time to time, but at the same time... | |
| Comedians are like flies trailing after the most noble people in the world, only interested in their shit. | |
| Well, you know, even the most grandiose, even the most elevated and virtuous person still puts his pants on one leg at a time. | |
| And, of course, comedians have wretched personal lives for the most part. | |
| Absolutely wretched personal lives. | |
| It's horrible. | |
| Where is the nobility? | |
| Have you, and maybe there are, again, I'm not that much up on comedy, but have you, is there a comedian who mocks evil and elevates virtue? | |
| So what are comedians really selling? | |
| They're selling escape from the demands of virtue. | |
| They get you to laugh at things. | |
| They get you to feel cynical. | |
| They are getting you off the hook. | |
| They're decommissioning you. | |
| They are retiring you from the need to pursue virtue because everything is foolish and everyone is ridiculous and everyone, all is vanity, right? | |
| All is vanity. |
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